For Muslim Center Sponsors, Early Missteps Fueled a Storm

By ANNE BARNARD; Sharaf Mowjood contributed reporting.

Published: August 11, 2010

Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, remembers her first conversation with Daisy Khan around 2005, years before Ms. Khan's idea for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan morphed into a controversy about Sept. 11, Islam and freedom of religion.

''Strollers,'' said Ms. Levitt, whom Ms. Khan had approached for advice on how to build an institution like the Jewish center -- with a swimming pool, art classes and joint projects with other religious groups. Ms. Levitt, a rabbi, urged Ms. Khan to focus on practical matters like a decent wedding hall and stroller parking.

''You can use all these big words like diversity and pluralism,'' Ms. Levitt recalled telling Ms. Khan, noting that with the population of toddlers booming in Manhattan, ''I'm down in the lobby dealing with the 500 strollers.''

Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up -- an oversight with consequences. The organizers built support among some Jewish and Christian groups, and even among some families of 9/11 victims, but did little to engage with likely opponents. More strikingly, they did not seek the advice of established Muslim organizations experienced in volatile post-9/11 passions and politics.

The organizers -- chiefly Ms. Khan; her husband, the imam of a mosque in the financial district; and a young real-estate investor born in New York -- did not hire a public-relations firm until after the hostility exploded in May. They went ahead with their first public presentation of the project -- a voluntary appearance at a community board meeting in Lower Manhattan -- just after an American Muslim, Faisal Shahzad, was arrested for planting a car bomb in Times Square.

''It never occurred to us,'' Ms. Khan said. ''We have been bridge builders for years.''

How Ms. Khan's early brainstorming led to today's combustible debate, one often characterized by powerful emotions and mistaken information, is a combination of arguable na?t?public-relations missteps and a national political climate in which perhaps no preparation could have headed off controversy.

As a result, supporters of the $100 million center, named Park51, which received its final approval from the city last week, are now beginning their fund-raising and detailed planning amid a broader battle. The future of the center -- organizers say it will have a mosque, but its 15 floors will be mainly for other functions -- has become grist for talk radio, cable television and election fights across the country.

Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said ironically in an interview Friday, ''This might become the most famous community center in the world.''

For American Muslims, the stakes have become painfully high.

''It has repercussions for the entire community,'' said Robina Niaz, who runs Turning Point, a group that fights domestic violence among Muslims. ''What it has done is suddenly made it legitimate for everybody else out there to lash out at Muslims. It has brought us together. But it also shows how much work we have to do.''

In 1999, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Ms. Khan's husband, tried to buy the former McBurney Y.M.C.A. on 23rd Street in Manhattan, telling the seller's broker, David Lebenstein, that he planned a kind of Muslim Y.

Knowing that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing still left raw nerves in New York, the imam assured Mr. Lebenstein, ''We're not the ones doing bombs; we're moderates and Americans.''

The sale would have gone through but for financing difficulties, said Mr. Lebenstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Imam Feisal is in Malaysia and could not be reached for comment for this article.

Imam Feisal, 62, moved to the United States as a teenager with his father, an Egyptian imam, and graduated from Columbia University. Until 2009, he was the Friday prayer leader at Masjid al Farah, a mosque in the Sufi tradition, which emphasizes mysticism and tolerance. The mosque was established two decades ago and is 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.

His sermons were infused with a ''sweet spirituality,'' not focused on ''rules and regulations'' or politics, said Adem Carroll, director of the Muslim Consultative Network, an advocacy group based in New York. Those sermons attracted his two allies in the current project, slated to be built at 45-51 Park Place.

Daisy Khan, who immigrated, also as a teenager, to Jericho, on Long Island, from Kashmir, married Imam Feisal in 1997. They founded a Sufi organization advocating melding Islamic observance with women's rights and modernity. After 9/11 they raised their profile, renaming the group the American Society for Muslim Advancement and focusing on connecting Muslims and wider American society. They spoke out against religious violence; the imam advised the F.B.I.; his wife joined the board of the 9/11 memorial and museum.

A few years later, Sharif el-Gamal, a developer whose Egyptian father was a Chemical Bank executive, asked the imam to perform his wedding.